Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents: Who they are, What they want, and How to win them over (29th Edition)

This excellent reference book is now in its 29th edition. I reviewed an earlier iteration a few years back and was quite impressed with it. This new version updates the listing information for dozens and dozens of publishers, editors, and agents.

Jeff Herman shares some inside knowledge about the publishing industry. The guide starts out with articles that can help authors in any stage of their publishing journey. There are practical tips from the author, as well as his wife, Deborah Herman, and Toni Robino, cofounder of Windword Literary Services. LLC.

The book is a little smaller than the previous edition but it still clocks in at over 400 pages. Herman didn’t apologize for the smaller edition but he did give some insight on why this might be the case.

He writes, “Much has changed and much has remained the same since my journey in publishing began in the early 1980s. Dozens of long-lived independent publishers have either disappeared or been absorbed into a numerically tiny oligarchy of multinational, trillion-dollar multimedia conglomerates, while few start-ups have emerged to take their place.”

I wonder if some of those smaller start-ups and publishers were affected by the global pandemic. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Several business didn’t seem to make it out the other side of that.

This is my favourite guidebook for writers. It is well written, excellently organized, and offers advice that any aspiring writer can follow. I recommend picking it up and following through to make your publishing dreams come true.